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Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Read in Turkish/ TürkçeThe 9th annual Internet Governance Forum will be held in
Istanbul from 2 to 5 September. Reporters Without Borders will be there
to denounce the increasing violations of freedom of information in
Turkey and to argue that respect for this freedom should be at the heart
of any Internet governance model.

Launched in 2005 under UN auspices, the annual IGF is supposed to
provide a neutral arena where governments, private sector and civil
society discuss Internet governance mechanisms. According to paragraph 72 of the “Tunis Agenda,” the
IGF's mission is to “identify emerging issues, bring them to the
attention of the relevant bodies and the general public, and, where
appropriate, make recommendations.”

In line with this mandate, Reporters Without Borders wants the
Turkish government's assaults on Internet freedom to be raised at the
Istanbul IGF.

Together with Amnesty İnternational, Human Rights Watch, the Turkish
Association of Journalists (TGC) and Turkey's Alternative Informatics
Association (Alternatif Bilisim Dernegi), RWB will hold a news
conference in Istanbul on 4 September in order to put the alarming
decline in freedom of information in Turkey on the IGF agenda.

The Alternative Informatics Association is also holding a parallel forum, called the Internet Ungovernance Forum, in which RWB will take part.

Turkish society is becoming more and more critical of the
authoritarianism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been prime minister
for the past 11 years and who was elected president on 10 August. The
scale of the “Occupy Gezi” protest
movement has been eloquently indicative of civil society discontent
with the government's increasingly repressive tendencies.

Submitted in December 2013 and adopted in February 2014, amendments to Law 5651 on the Internet
strengthened the powers of the High Council for Telecommunications
(TIB), allowing it to “preventively” block websites on such vague
grounds as the presence of content that is “discriminatory or insulting
towards certain members of society.”

The Turkish intelligence agency MIT has also had its powers enhanced
by a law forcing any individual or entity to surrender data on request,
a provision that tramples on the right of journalists to protect the
confidentiality of their sources.

The Turkish government's ongoing talks with the US company Procera Networks and the Swedish company Netclean Technologies about the acquisition of network surveillance software are an additional source of concern.

In March 2014, on the eve of municipal elections, Turkey joined the small group of countries that have blocked Twitter and YouTube on a lasting basis. They include such repressive states as China, Iran, Vietnam, Pakistan, North Korea and Eritrea.

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